Efforts to enhance the continuity of patient care and minimize unnecessary hospitalization costs have increased the demand for patient monitoring, in both ambulatory contexts and acute-care hospital settings. Continuous patient monitoring that is both accurate and convenient is desired to assess the severity of a medical condition before it escalates to a level that is less responsive to intervention, or requires more invasive treatment. Such monitoring may be used to identify certain abnormalities that precede clinically significant and life-threatening deterioration/decompensation of a patient's health status. For example, monitoring may be used to determine if a patient is experiencing a clinically significant deterioration in left ventricular function and/or mitral valve function. However, traditional monitoring methods used to detect left ventricular dysfunction (LVD) and mitral valve regurgitation (MR) often produce false-positive and false-negative results, and are unduly invasive, costly, and time-consuming. Thus, clinicians are not able to easily ascertain the emergence of significant changes in LVD and/or worsening of MR for the purposes of prevention and early identification.